Front Far East copier

Discuss emulation of the Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom.

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deadbody
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Re: Front Far East copier

Post by deadbody »

Nothing like resurrecting a ten year old topic, and I think this question should be in the hardware section, but anyway...

What is the format of the 8 byte copier header/config data? From analysis (of the three disks I have) I have deduced that the middle 4 bytes are some kind of name/ident string. But what about the first two bytes and the last two bytes? How do they work and what do they do?
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kyuusaku
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Re: Front Far East copier

Post by kyuusaku »

The FDS BIOS loads the contents of the config file as it's scanning disk (side) "A", in doing so it configures two of the copier's internal registers and boostraps it's own internal BIOS for control (to facilitate loading the subsequent disks). The file may or may not also hold the game's "catalog number" so the disk or disk image can be easily identified, but that information is just ignored as nothing's mapped there in the hardware. The letters generally correspond to a game's size and/or mapper, and letters to a release number (these were published in Hong Kong/Taiwan game shop flyers and magazines.) The Nintendo header area is also frequently embellished a little with copier related extensions, but aside from extending the disk count I'm not sure they mean much.
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